Live from the English Channel: Microbe-Inspired Jazz

The English Channel (photo credit: flickr/neilalderney123).

When looking for inspiration, most songwriters to go well-used emotional wells – triumph or loss, love or heartbreak. But Peter Larsen, a biologist at Argonne National Laboratory, looked to the microbes of the English Channel. He used seven years’ worth of genetic and environmental data, converting geochemical and microbial abundance measurements into notes, beats, and chords.

After some time in the proverbial recording studio, Larsen produced four bebop-style jazz compositions. The songs are meandering, syncopated tunes that sound like something you’d hear in an avant-garde jazz bar.

Larsen’s muse is the cold, oft-traveled waters that separate Britain from France. Generations of scientists have sampled the site for nearly a century, measuring temperature, salinity, and concentrations of phosphorous and nitrogen. It’s an historic data set from an oceanographically important location, a site that represents the nutrient-rich interface between the shallow continental shelf and the deep ocean.

Within the last decade, microbial diversity data was integrated into the sampling plan, an addition that reflected the team’s growing awareness of the importance of surface ocean microbial populations.

The research generated an embarrassment of riches – terabytes of data that needed to be sorted, correlated, and analyzed. “It’s my job to take complex data sets and find ways to represent that data in a way that makes the patterns accessible to human observations,” says Larsen. “There’s no way to look at 10,000 rows and hundreds of columns and intuit what’s going on.”

And so, Larsen turned to music. Researchers had worked with sonified data before, turning earthquake data into classical music, for example, but the natural variance in microbial populations, with “ordered but non-repeating patterns,” seemed more in tune with improvisational jazz. This musical style would allow for chord progression, melodies within that progression, and improvisation.

To turn data into music, Larsen employed a few different approaches. In one composition, the chord progression comes from seasonal shifts in radiation intensity while the melody – restricted to an octave and a half – came from the combination of eight notes, each tied to a chemical measurement. If nitrate concentrations are high for a given sample point, its note in the corresponding measure will be high-pitched, and vice-versa. Every oceanic observation gets its own musical measure, so each song covers a time course of several years.

In another song called “Far and Wide,” the Rickettsiales microbial lineage takes center stage. The melody tracks its population – rising and falling based on temporal patterns – while chords correspond to radiation and temperature measurements. When Rickettsiales was the most abundant type of organism, a cymbal crash highlights the occasion. Four of Larsen’s compositions can be found here.

Biochemically-inspired musical composition is poorly represented on the Billboard charts, but Larsen is doing his part to promote the genre. “Using music in this way is an extraordinarily valuable exercise in approaching complex data sets,” he says. Larsen’s next opus? “I’ve thought about focusing more on a single organism,” he reflects, “and maybe tracing a single carbon atom through a photosynthetic pathway.”

The record deals and Grammy Awards are no doubt soon to come, but for now, Larsen is just appreciating the process. “There are few opportunities to express natural beauty in a scientific endeavor,” he says. “But these systems are wonderfully beautiful in their intricacies.”